Question Hard crashes whilst gaming ?

[ThanksForTheWaffles]

I recently started playing Baldur's gate III and after 0,5-1 hours of playing my screens went black, saying there's no input. There was still sound but I had to reboot my PC. It has kept crashing. Every time after ~1 hr of playing.
Occasionally my PC would reboot on its own after crashing.

At first I thought it was an issue with the game specifically but today my pc has also crashed while playing a different game (Hunt: Showdown).


My specs;

Motherboard​	ASRock B365M Pro4​
CPU​	Intel Core i7-9700​
GPU​	Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti​
PSU​	Xilence XP700R7 (700W)​
RAM​	2x Transcend 8GB 2666 MHz​

Everything is 2 years old.

I thought maybe components were overheating so I logged temps and voltages using SpeedFan, but as far as I can see temperatures are within normal limits.

What could this be and how do I fix it?

 

[SorryBella]

Well, what does the event viewer say when that happened? Check the error from Administrative Events tab, particularly right after the crash.

 

[ThanksForTheWaffles]

Well, what does the event viewer say when that happened? Check the error from Administrative Events tab, particularly right after the crash.

Oh, I'm not at all familiar with even viewer so I'm not sure what info I should be looking at exactly.

Screens went black at 16:11. This is what I'm seeing in event viewer;

 

[SorryBella]

Im more concerned about the Kernel-Power part. Can i get full detail on that error?

 

[ThanksForTheWaffles]

Im more concerned about the Kernel-Power part. Can i get full detail on that error?

Certainly:

The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.

 

[ThanksForTheWaffles]

I seem to have fixed it. I do not know exactly what has fixed things, but I'll list all the things I did.

In reliability monitor, around the times my PC would crash it would list stisvc stopped working, or svchost.exe_stisvc stopped working as critical event.
I do not know the causal link (whether the crash stopped the program, or the program stopping caused the crashing) but online I read that this could be caused by a conflict with canon printer drivers. So I unplugged the printer and uninstalled all drivers. Since then, reliability monitor didn't show an error.

I ran malwarebytes, which found a bunch of issues. Apparently I had a coin miner on my PC that got in through some stuff I torrented. So I got rid of that.

Also ran sfc /scannow in cmd which found an issue that was then repaired.

And lastly: my PSU air intake is on the bottom of my PC and the dust filter was disgusting and full of dust.
So it might have been overheating after all and I didn't notice 'cause the PSU apparently doesn't have a sensor you can read.

 

[dave.rara66]

Glad to hear you solved the issue. I too would assume that your PSU was overheating. If there is any option to flip it over so the air intake is facing up, I would do so. Unless you move your case to other locations on a regular basis, the PSU doesn't even need to be screwed down if it sits on the bottom of your case and does not have screw holes on what is currently the "top" side to secure it.